> A saner way to handle repos is to recognize that it's not necessary for people to have the full history of everything in the repository stored on their local machine most of the time.
Local history enables rebasing. Of course you can do it without local history already present, say in SVN you'd use separate branches for changes and 'rebased' changes where you merge your work on top of some new state of trunk. But this involvs creating branches(and at cleast one checkout for separate branch folder) and communicating with the server(takes time). This all means that people almost never do this.
With git rebase is a snap.
But of course one can live without rebase, it's not oxygen or something.
You can download the history you need for rebasing when you do the rebase command, in effect turning the local .git (or .hg) store into basically a local cache of a remote repository.
Local history enables rebasing. Of course you can do it without local history already present, say in SVN you'd use separate branches for changes and 'rebased' changes where you merge your work on top of some new state of trunk. But this involvs creating branches(and at cleast one checkout for separate branch folder) and communicating with the server(takes time). This all means that people almost never do this. With git rebase is a snap. But of course one can live without rebase, it's not oxygen or something.